world

Nature has its own ways to recover from any magnitude of damage caused by human beings and their eternal ignorance. It proves the human species its healing power and its ability to replenish lives on lands that are made barren by the everlasting human stupidity. When one among the four nuclear reactors exploded in Chernobyl power station in the Northern Ukraine on 26th April 1986 at 0124, when its engineers tested whether it’s cooling pump system would operate under low power, it scripted history as one of the deadliest nuclear disaster ever that wiped out thousands of human lives and forced evacuation of 350,000 people. A few weeks after the reactor spewed radioactive elements into atmosphere ruthlessly, not even a very few would have thought that life in Chernobyl will be a possibility a...

The first hint of human existence on earth appeared 4 million years ago in a total life span of 13.6 billion years, the age of the cosmos. Passing through various stages of evolution, until 2017, Donald Trump, colonization of Mars, connecting Elon Musk’s brain with a man-made machine, the emerging far-right are the new worries for humans, mostly to those who believe in a young-earth. Among all the crisis in a more chaotic everyday world, there are still vast swathes of land that are not inhabited by human innovation and hypocrisy. There exists a comfortable, ethereal peace in the middle of a battlefield, where lives are busy pursuing material and wealth in some places and the others filled with hues and cries pleading for lives. There are people – inhabiting this very same earth as y...

Dow Jones Index was created in 1896 as an indicator of how well the US economy was growing when 30 of its large publicly held companies did well during a standard trading session. Even today, the DJIA represents an average of the stocks of top 30 companies that are majorly considered to have an impact on the growth or decline of the US economy. Just 30 out of the 4333 (as on June 2016) publicly traded companies and the number has come down from more than 8000 since 1996 due to various factors including the higher underwriting and registration costs, market volatility etc. Apart from representing the 30 huge companies, higher DJIA index value does not represent growing personal income, GDP, lower unemployment rates or any economic indicator that reflects true growth. More often, the DJIA ha...

Human beings were once wanderers that never got settled in one place. Thrown onto this planet, they treaded different paths, hunted down animals and moved on with their lives curiously in knowing more about the place they were thrown into. Slowly, they became sedentary and started living as communities that paved way for a number of civilizations to arise, each unique in its own way. Archaeologists have studied human civilizations for many years, but they were never stunned before like they were on a hot sunny day in 1994, when something peculiar was found in Gobeklitepe, 15 kms away from Sanliyurfa in Turkey. Human beings have been thinking that agriculture put an end to the nomadic lifestyle of our early ancestors and ushered in settlements giving rise to cities, civilization, art and re...

Colombia is just another mundane story of rebellion against social injustice that began 52 years ago. Long before, it was a country plagued with inequality. The government sold its large swathe of land to private owners in the late 19th century or in the early 20th century to pay off the country’s debt. Eventually in 1964, the farmers and poor workers of the land joined to form the rebel group FARC seeking social justice and land reforms. FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia, abbreviated as per its Spanish expansion, was founded as the ideology of communism was widespread in the then world. The conflict has killed nearly 220,000 lives since 1958 as per the report created by a commission of the Colombian government. Even before the genesis of FARC, Colombia was not at peace. Whe...

Human race had always pursued the path of progress to develop and move to the next level. This urge to progress is not just an instinctive passion, as it readily seems, but a dire need to meet the growing demands of our progressive economic fallibility that convenience and comfort for the chosen ones at the cost of millions of others are the primary, but hidden indicators of growth. Growth for all is just a smokescreen as it slowly transpires to be a half truth. Development is made over the absence or degeneration of what existed previously. Development is made on the remains of the demolished beliefs of those millions. Attempts to create economic progress at the cost of cultural, environmental, and personal values is the habit of our race and one among many such is underway in four of the...

In the recent past, Ian Fleming’s James Bond-as-the-protagonist movies were responsible to make spying a component of thrilling entertainment. Even today to many, spying is analogous to James Bond’s thrillers. But spying or espionage has played a very instrumental role in the history of national defence and is still very much alive. It is not dead but it has taken a form that is different from what we have conceived as spying. Even though cold war is considered to be over by historians, the after effects still ripple across both the superpowers. In 2010, a network of Russian spies- who were claimed to have involved in money laundering– were arrested by Washington. Their job was to identify insiders from the government who could be turned into potential informers for Kremlin later and...

The world has started moving away from fossil fuels in a noble cause to fight climate change and save the earth, while pushing an industry that fueled the growth story of mankind on to the brink of extinction. This transformation has also forced the largest coal companies in the US to layoff huge number of coal workers before running into bankruptcy. The surge of natural gas as a cheaper, environment-friendly source of energy – thanks to fracking- and solar panels with their associated subsidies are gradually replacing coal based energy. This has made coal companies spew venom at President Obama, who championed this cause and citing the reality of climate change as ‘Obama’s hoax’. The share prices of coal companies are falling steeply as the US Energy Information Administration...

While the NSG is aimed at preventing countries from developing nuclear weapons by controlling the supply of the materials required, the super powers including the USA and Russia have kept their nuclear weapons on high alert that can be fired under short notice within minutes to claim millions of lives. Anyhow, both the nations along with the other nuclear powers have a common vision: a nuclear-free world. While we all unite to talk about human welfare and development as a normative behaviour, with what we have in our hands as a tragic weapon, our words of wisdom just go as a meaningless rant. We do preach, while we do not follow in act. This is not an irony, but an ill-fated nature of our worldly political issues. It’s not just the two cold war nations, but along with seven other countries...

Energy is transferred between several forms of species through the complex food chain that begins with the plants. Plants or the producers are the primary source of energy as animals and human beings feed on them or other animals to gain energy for survival. When these organisms, both producers and primary consumers, or their genes are modified, there is a risk that the energy consumed could become counter-productive and lead to hazardous health and environmental effects. The organisms, including plants and animals, whose DNA is modified in laboratories are called (GMOs) Genetically Modified Organisms and they becoming a part of the food chain are what have stoked controversy in the recent years. The proponents of GM crops argue that human species has been genetically engineering food crop...

Have you heard of Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness (GNH) as an alternative to Gross National Product (GNP)? It shifted to GNH from GNP as Jigme Singye Wangchuck, the fourth Bhutanese King thought that happiness is more the essence of life than mere products. The country’s 7-hour survey in 2015 finds only 8.8% of its population unhappy while the remaining are narrowly, extensively or deeply happy. The rest of the world is more material-focussed measuring Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as an indicator of growth and happiness. A nation’s growth is measured by the quantity of finished products and services it generates during a period of time and this number, after a bunch of arithmetics, becomes the Gross Domestic Product of that nation. It is popularly believed that GDP reflects how happy and...

A virus that was found in 1947 and has largely remained dormant for nearly more than half a century with no devastating effects on mankind, Zika is reaching a pandemic level in the Southern America. The World Health Organization has declared a global emergency due to the pace at which this virus has started spreading across continents. Showing symptoms of seasonal flu with body aches, and joint pains in adults, it affects the foetus of a pregnant woman causing poorly developed brain and skull, known by the name microcephaly, in a newborn baby. The virus can also be transmitted sexually other than being passed from a mother to child through the placenta. [Body1AdHere] Almost a million people are infected by the virus in Brazil, which is already tottering with economic and political turmoil....